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In-person and mail-in voting, at least in the USA, is already quite insecure. Its amazing to me that with all the consternation about Russian bots influencing o

In-person and mail-in voting, at least in the USA, is already quite insecure. Its amazing to me that with all the consternation about Russian bots influencing our elections we would even consider moving them online without strongly bolstering the level of identity verification. However, the argument has been that authenticating voter identity is racist and disenfranchises poor voters. I dont see how these two thoughts can possibly be resolved in a way that gives everyone confidence in the election outcome, so trying to do seems like a recipe for violent protests. I am not looking forward to the aftermath of this election if the voting mechanisms are changed.

snarf21 7y ago
Yes, in person and main in voting are insecure. The thing they are though is secure at SCALE. If you hack a digital system, it is trivial to cast thousands or millions of votes. If is very very hard to mobilize the same number of humans and go to the polls with someone else's name. Especially, if they have already voted. The same with paper; the scheme is revealed quickly when 10K mail in votes show up for voters who already voted and in one big batch of mail. It is easy to detect. Digitally, you can hide behind VPNs, etc. and we'd have to build systems to detect fraud here that we don't have. Additionally, it is easier to hack the backend and just manipulate the database for some system that was likely outsourced to a company on a government kickback.
- jerkstate 7y ago
  If you had 20 agents each in 20 cities, dropping off, say, 20 ballots per day each in 20 different mailboxes for 20 days, thats 20^5 or 3.2 million votes with 400 agents. That certainly seems plausable for a state actor or large NGO and seems difficult to detect. The difficulty would be either "harvesting" the unfilled ballots undetected or reproducing ones with the correct digital signature (I assume the barcodes on the mail-in ballots are unique, securely generated, and authenticate the recipient), which again would not be implausable for a state actor or large NGO with agents in the right place, the biggest saving grace being that different states have different systems. However, with national popular vote, you just need to crack 1 state system to skew the popular vote.

snarf21 7y ago

Yes, in person and main in voting are insecure. The thing they are though is secure at SCALE. If you hack a digital system, it is trivial to cast thousands or millions of votes. If is very very hard to mobilize the same number of humans and go to the polls with someone else's name. Especially, if they have already voted. The same with paper; the scheme is revealed quickly when 10K mail in votes show up for voters who already voted and in one big batch of mail. It is easy to detect. Digitally, you can hide behind VPNs, etc. and we'd have to build systems to detect fraud here that we don't have. Additionally, it is easier to hack the backend and just manipulate the database for some system that was likely outsourced to a company on a government kickback.

jerkstate 7y ago
If you had 20 agents each in 20 cities, dropping off, say, 20 ballots per day each in 20 different mailboxes for 20 days, thats 20^5 or 3.2 million votes with 400 agents. That certainly seems plausable for a state actor or large NGO and seems difficult to detect. The difficulty would be either "harvesting" the unfilled ballots undetected or reproducing ones with the correct digital signature (I assume the barcodes on the mail-in ballots are unique, securely generated, and authenticate the recipient), which again would not be implausable for a state actor or large NGO with agents in the right place, the biggest saving grace being that different states have different systems. However, with national popular vote, you just need to crack 1 state system to skew the popular vote.